Page 4 - 49A Field Guide to Genetic Programming

Many thanks to Tyler Hutchison for the use of his cool drawing on the
cover (and elsewhere!), and for finding those scary pinks and greens.
We had the invaluable assistance of many people, and we are very grateful
for their individual and collective efforts, often on very short timelines. Rick
Riolo, Matthew Walker, Christian Gagne, Bob McKay, Giovanni Pazienza,
and Lee Spector all provided useful suggestions based on an early techni-
cal report version. Yossi Borenstein, Caterina Cinel, Ellery Crane, Cecilia
Di Chio, Stephen Dignum, Edgar Galv´an-L´opez, Keisha Harriott, David
Hunter, Lonny Johnson, Ahmed Kattan, Robert Keller, Andy Korth, Yev-
geniya Kovalchuk, Simon Lucas, Wayne Manselle, Alberto Moraglio, Oliver
Oechsle, Francisco Sepulveda, Elias Tawil, Edward Tsang, William Tozier
and Christian Wagner all contributed to the final proofreading festival.
Their sharp eyes and hard work did much to make the book better; any
remaining errors or omissions are obviously the sole responsibility of the
authors.
We would also like to thank Prof. Xin Yao and the School of Computer
Science of The University of Birmingham and Prof. Bernard Buxton of Uni-
versity College, London, for continuing support, particularly of the genetic
programming bibliography. We also thank Schloss Dagstuhl, where some of
the integration of this book took place.
Most of the tools used in the construction of this book are open source, 1
and we are very grateful to all the developers whose efforts have gone into
building those tools over the years.
As mentioned above, this book started life as a chapter. This was
2
for a forthcoming handbook on computational intelligence edited by John
Fulcher and Lakhmi C. Jain. We are grateful to John Fulcher for his useful
comments and edits on that book chapter. We would also like to thank most
warmly John Koza, who co-authored the aforementioned chapter with us,
and for allowing us to reuse some of his original material in this book.
This book is a summary of nearly two decades of intensive research in
the field of genetic programming, and we obviously owe a great debt to all
the researchers whose hard work, ideas, and interactions ultimately made
this book possible. Their work runs through every page, from an idea made
somewhat clearer by a conversation at a conference, to a specific concept
or diagram. It has been a pleasure to be part of the GP community over
the years, and we greatly appreciate having so much interesting work to
summarise!
March 2008 Riccardo Poli
William B. Langdon
Nicholas Freitag McPhee
1 See the colophon (page 235) for more details.
2
Tentatively entitled Computational Intelligence: A Compendium and to be pub-
lished by Springer in 2008.